On Dave’s forum there is a good discussion going but it is not getting much attention.

He stated

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Many people at the camp have broken boards, concrete blocks, even baseball bats.....but these same people pulled their power during some simulations...DID THEY PULL THEIR POWER OR IN FACT HAVE NO POWER?......the same power that broken these hard objects..were unable to hit someone in a protective suit that is designed for HIGH BLUNT TRAUMA......the question is WHY?...

So what about your ‘confident competence’? We have heard so much about these words representing dojos training concepts that will emerge automatically when really needed, right?

Sure_ it is a good mindset, and I am sure we can all relate episodes of such performances for some of us.

Let’s see_ can we define competence? How about unconscious competence as implied in another big TMA word _ MUSHIN

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"Competence" isn't easy to define either. That's because competence is context-dependent. A person can be a champion bull’s-eye shooter and miss the target completely in a shoot house or in force-on-force training.

As Bruce Siddle explains in sharpening the Warrior's Edge, a person fighting to stay alive must be competent to perform under high levels of stress and arousal. Furthermore, "competence" in one situation may be both quantitatively and qualitatively different from competence in another.

Therefore, the "competence" aspect of unconscious competence refers to the ability to successfully implement learned behaviors and achieve a defined objective in a specific context or set of similar contexts in an automatic manner.

For the purposes of this discussion, we'll define an unconsciously competent person as one who recognizes a situation/problem without first having to perceive it in focal awareness and then implements a learned set of behaviors to resolve that situation/problem without having to mediate the behavioral response in focal awareness.

In the case of self-defense, focal awareness is reserved for analyzing "big picture" issues, such as monitoring the on-going course of the interaction with the assailant/potential assailant.

This monitoring allows the individual to recognize` when the situation has become less "safe," and allows him/her to implement an appropriate defensive or alerting response.

It also allows him/her to recognize when the situation has become "safe" and terminate a defensive response, or implement a follow-up response at a lower level of the force continuum.

This is very similar to what psychologists have referred to as "recognition-primed decision-making."

In psychology, the four stages of competence relate to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill:

Unconscious incompetence The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit or has a desire to address it.

Conscious incompetence Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

Conscious competence The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.

Unconscious competence The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she can also teach it to others.

To be sure, the defender's response can still be described in terms of Col. John Boyd's process of Observing, Orienting, Deciding and Acting (i.e. the OODA Loop).

However, solving the tactical problem is not undertaken through a process of bringing observations into full awareness, orienting to the details of the situation, weighing the pros and cons of alternative responses and then implementing a step-by-step remedy.

Instead, the unconsciously competent individual begins responding appropriately as he or she first becomes aware of the threat.

Therefore he/she orients while observing and acts while deciding, and none of these cognitive processes take place in focal awareness.

For this reason, people who have experienced a critical incident involving deadly force are often unable to describe the exact, step-by-step process by which they defended themselves.

But how can someone act appropriately before fully perceiving the details of an emerging situation? On the surface, this sounds impossible. Yet think for a moment.

Most of us do this all the time. Ever steer your car through a skid on slick pavement? Do you stop and observe, "Damn! I'm skidding to the left!" Then orient yourself by saying, "Remember, I'm driving a rear wheel drive car, and the lane to my left is empty."

Then tell yourself, "Therefore, my decision is to take my foot slowly off of the gas and steer into the skid." And finally say to yourself, "Okay Joe, now slowly lift your right foot from the gas while you use your arms and hands to slowly turn the wheel to the left."

Of course you don't! You begin maneuver almost instantaneously as the visual image in your brain perceives your car leaving its lane and your kinesthetic sense tells you that your car is moving in a direction you don't want it to go.

But how can this all happen at once? Currently, the best explanation is provided by psychologist Gary Klein in Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.

He's proposed that the human brain is capable of multi-tasking. His theory works like this: A visual image is picked up by the retina and is transmitted to the visual center of the brain in the occipital lobe.

From there the image is sent to two locations in the brain. On the one hand, it goes to the higher levels of the cerebral cortex which is the seat of full conscious awareness.

There, in the frontal lobes, the image is available to be recognized, analyzed, input into a decision process and acted upon as the person considers appropriate.

Let's call this "the slow track," because full recognition of the meaning of a visual image, analyzing what it represents, deciding what to do and then doing it takes time. Some psychologists also refer to this mental process as System II cognition.

If you used System II cognition in critical situations like a skid, you wouldn't have enough time to finish processing the OODA Loop before your car went over the cliff.

Each of these frames has been recorded in the brain through personal life experience and each is associated in the brain's motor centers with a behavioral routine, or set of routines, which, again by experience, the individual has learned are appropriate responses.

As the pre-frontal areas of the brain scan the visual/sensory information it receives, they attempt to match it to the frames that are stored in memory, most likely in a hierarchical manner.

When a match or near match is made to a frame that contains a situation which represents a serious threat to the safety of the individual the pre-frontal areas that have received the sensory input immediately send a message to the brain's motor center initiating what the individual has learned is the most appropriate response to that frame.

By the time the higher levels of the brain realize that there is a problem, the solution is already in progress. The higher levels then switch to co-monitoring the progress of the solution to ensure the response is indeed the proper one.

If so, and if the situation contained in the frame is successfully resolved, the pre-frontal brain returns control of behavior to the higher levels of the cortex. If not, both levels of the brain continue to work toward an appropriate resolution.

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